L'albero delle noci (Sanremo 2025)

"L'albero delle noci," Brunori Sas's entry at Sanremo 2025, is Italian cantautore craft at its most quietly devastating — a mid-tempo ballad that opens sparse, with piano and acoustic guitar, then swells through strings toward an aching, controlled catharsis rather than a bombastic Sanremo climax. Dario Brunori sings in a weathered, conversational baritone, the voice of a thoughtful man past his first youth, every word placed with the unhurried precision of someone who writes lyrics first and melodies to serve them. The walnut tree of the title becomes a vessel for memory, rootedness, and the slow accounting of a life — fatherhood, time's passage, the things that outlast us and the things we plant knowing we may not sit in their shade. The imagery is domestic and earthy, drawn from the southern Italian landscape of Brunori's Calabria, but the emotional register is universal: tenderness shadowed by mortality, gratitude braided with melancholy. Against the spectacle and glitter of the Sanremo stage, where this finished near the top, the song's restraint reads as its own statement — a refusal to shout. Brunori belongs to the literate, introspective wing of Italian songwriting descended from De André and Conte, and this is him at his most affecting. Best heard with full attention, lyrics in hand, in the contemplative hush of evening when one is taking stock of what truly matters.